Consumer vs Enterprise Gap – Keynote Session at HP Discover

Chris Wahl · Posted on2012-06-04

Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson delivered an excellent keynote speech at the opening general session of HP Discover 2012. In it, many topics were covered that helped to identify how change is occurring on the IT space around how users interact with one another, and how the gap between consumer and enterprise services are forcing a lot of pains around how applications and services are delivered. Heavily emphasized was services like Salesforce (which is much more adapative to the user, instead of forcing the user to adapt to it). At one point, the idea of simply providing workers a “fat Internet pipe and toner in the printers” was about all the creative folks need – they can figure the rest out themselves.

Kunal Nayyar, one of the stars of “The Big Bang Theory” kicks things off

This struck a chord with me back when I used to manage an enterprise Exchange environment. Users were allocated mailbox sizes in the megabytes (such as 250, 500, or sometimes 1000 MB). Many of the tickets that came in revolved around solving mailbox size issues, with weak tactics like archiving to a PST file or deleting older emails the only resort left to IT. Meanwhile, Gmail has had multiple gigabytes of mailbox space available to users, on demand and free of charge, for many years now. How does an enterprise IT shop honestly expect to compete with a service like this and not foster an army of resentful users?

A quick peek behind the curtain at a media control station for the HP Discover general session room

I hope this topic gets you thinking, and look forward to seeing how HP plans to solve issues, like the one above but many more, in the rest of this week’s coverage of HP Discover 2012.

One other keynote presentation was given by yours truly, entitled “Forcing users to your will: How to rule with an iron fist” but unfortunately no one stuck around for that.